behind the PEDAL BOARD with A Beacon School
In January of 2019, Chris and I went to Miami Beach to see a New Order concert. It was the first time I had ever traveled to a different city for a single show, and it was truly a dream trip. Cubano sandwiches were consumed, and several trips to Mac's Club Deuce, the greatest bar in America, were taken; during one of them, we met a ruddy man from Boston who bought us Fireball shots and got mad at us when we didn't down them fast enough. The actual New Order show was unreal. I remember the stage awash in blue and purple light, and the most gorgeous synthesizer sounds wafting through the air. I turned to Chris at one point and said, "Why don't more people make music that is beautiful?"
Well, at least one more person makes music that is beautiful, and that's Patrick J. Smith, who helms a dream pop project called A Beacon School. I met Patrick quite a while ago in New York and the first time I saw an A Beacon School show, which I think was at the venue The Sultan Room (a great place to see a show and also order some tasty falafel) I had that same feeling: this was music of great beauty. The synths, they shimmered. The basslines, they gently pulsated. The guitars...well, they offered soundscapes as layered and translucent-to-opaque as watercolor paintings.
It's not often a brain like mine gets totally smoothed out by the power of music—many thoughts, head full, beeaaeuugh—but it happened at the A Beacon School show. If you want to relax and admire some beautiful music, I strongly recommend the A Beacon School experience.
manumiguezz
Recently Patrick posted on Instagram that he was re-doing his guitar pedal board, and I pounced on the opportunity to do a feature that I have wanted to do for a while on I Enjoy Music, which is an ANNOTATED PEDAL BOARD. I learned to play guitar in middle school but never got advanced enough to start messing with, like, Tones and such, so the pedal board has always been a source of fascination to me. I feel like pedal boards exist...at the intersection...of art and technology? And they have a Things Organized Neatly quality that speaks to my heart, as well as the rough rectangular dimensions of a pack of cigarettes (the most wonderfully sized object of all time).
So I asked Patrick to label the pedals on his board with a few words maximum, to describe what each of them do for the A Beacon School Sound. He graciously obliged! Below, the annotated pedal board...
YAY. Thanks Patrick!! Catch A Beacon School on a tour of the American South this February.
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